"This recording is a modern interpretation of sound poems written and performed by German Dadaist Hugo Ball almost a century ago. Those familiar with Ball know him as the author of these innovative works and founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, Dada's Zurich birthplace. Despite the sound poems' artistic legacy, they constitute only a small part of Ball's creative output. The purpose of these liner notes, then, is to consider the complex life and work of the man behind the sound poems.

Ball was born in western Germany at the end of the nineteenth century to a large Catholic family with ties to the region's leather industry. His parents pushed him to learn a useful trade, but young Ball identified as an artist. He studied literature and philosophy at university before leaving to learn acting. Germany's thriving experimental theater community would be his creative home from 1911 until 1915.

Ball excelled as a dramaturge, championing new repertoire, promoting local actors, and writing influential essays on modern theater. World War I interrupted his collaboration with the painter Wassily Kandinsky on what they called the New Theater, one "bursting at once in dance, color, mime, music, and word." (Ball, "Das Münchner Künstlertheater,"1914) It would be a Gesamtkunstwerk for the twentieth century, a vision Ball later realized at the Cabaret Voltaire.[...]"-Melissa Venator, from the liner notes